The Obama administration didn’t tell Pakistani officials about plans to raid Osama bin Laden’s compound out of fear that they might warn the Al Qaeda leader or his supporters about the mission, according to CIA director Leon Panetta.

Early on in the planning of the attack, “it was decided that any effort to work with the Pakistanis could jeopardize the mission” because “they might alert the targets,” Panetta told Time Magazine in an interview published Tuesday morning.

Concerns about whether Pakistan is helping or hindering the U.S. war on terror have been circulating since Sunday, as lawmakers and commentators question how the large, walled-off compound could have escaped notice in a town with a heavy military presence. Administration officials offered somewhat mixed accounts Monday of how involved Pakistan was in the mission, and the Pakistani president wrote an op-ed on Tuesday saying that his country was not involved though it supports the war on terror.

In several interviews early Tuesday morning, White House counterterrorism adviser John Brennan vowed to launch an investigation to determine whether the Pakistani government had aided the Al Qaeda leader even while saying publicly that it was helping the United States. “It would be premature to rule out the possibility,” he told NPR. “We’re not accusing anybody at this point, but we want to make sure we get to the bottom of this.”
In a letter to CIA employees on Monday, Panetta, who was nominated by President Barack Obama to be the next defense secretary, wrote that while “nothing will ever compensate for the pain and suffering inflicted by this mass murderer and his henchmen,” bin Laden’s death was still a source of comfort.

The raid on bin Laden’s compound was “the culmination of intense and tireless effort on the part of many dedicated agency officers over many years,” Panetta wrote. “A promise has been kept,” he said. “And a war will be won.”

Panetta is set to speak to members of Congress late Tuesday afternoon and to appear in taped interviews on “NBC Nightly News” and the “CBS Evening News.” An advance clip of the NBC interview shows Panetta saying that he believes the killing was a major milestone but not the end of Al Qaeda or administration efforts in the war on terror.

In another interview, with PBS, Panetta said that he and Obama did not follow video footage of the raid on bin Laden’s compound and did not see a transmission of the Al Qaeda leader getting shot. “No, not at all,” he said when asked whether Obama saw the shots fired. Rather, he said there were 20 or 25 “very tense” minutes during which top administration officials waited for word on whether the attack succeeded.

Panetta also said he was not aware of whether bin Laden was able to say anything to the Navy SEALs who attacked him in the moments before he was killed. “To be frank, I don’t think he had a lot of time to say anything,” Panetta said.